es along the highways were even more appalling, for here
the retreating soldiery and the fugitive civilians were mixed in
inextricable confusion. By mid-afternoon on Wednesday the road
from Antwerp to Ghent, a distance of forty miles, was a solid mass
of refugees, and the same was true of every road, every lane, every
footpath leading in a westerly or a northerly direction. The people
fled in motor-cars and in carriages, in delivery-wagons, in moving-
vans, in farm-carts, in omnibuses, in vehicles drawn by oxen, by
donkeys, even by cows, on horseback, on bicycles, and there
were thousands upon thousands afoot. I saw men trundling
wheelbarrows piled high with bedding and with their children
perched upon the bedding. I saw sturdy young peasants carrying
their aged parents in their arms. I saw women of fashion in fur coats
and high-heeled shoes staggering along clinging to the rails of the
caissons or to the ends of wagons. I saw white-haired men and
women grasping the harness of the gun-teams or the stirrup-
leathers of the troopers, who, themselves exhausted from many
days of fighting, slept in their saddles as they rode. I saw springless
farm-wagons literally heaped with wounded soldiers with piteous
white faces; the bottoms of the wagons leaked and left a trail of
blood behind them. A very old priest, too feeble to walk, was
trundled by two young priests in a handcart. A young woman, an
expectant mother, was tenderly and anxiously helped on by her
husband. One of the saddest features of all this dreadful procession
was the soldiers, many of them wounded, and so bent with fatigue
from many days of marching and fighting that they could hardly
raise their feet. One infantryman who could bear his boots no longer
had tied them to the cleaning-rod of his rifle. Another had strapped
his boots to his cowhide knapsack and limped forward with his
swollen feet in felt slippers. Here were a group of Capuchin monks
abandoning their monastery; there a little party of white-faced nuns
shepherding the flock of children--many of them fatherless--who had
been entrusted to their care. The confusion was beyond all
imagination, the clamour deafening: the rattle of wheels, the
throbbing of motors, the clatter of hoofs, the cracking of whips, the
curses of the drivers, the groans of the wounded, the cries of
women, the whimpering of children, threats, pleadings, oaths,
screams, imprecations, and always the monotonous shuffle, shuffle,
shuff